Interesting. I'd admit I was one that had an opinion based on the censorship surrounding discussing the PR more than the actual code aspect of this. I do find your "*finally* enforcing the rule piece is interesting" comment interesting. Why are they choosing to start enforcement now? Will they conveniently go back to not doing so after this one is wrapped up? I feel like I've seen this sort of thing before, about a year or so ago, but I cannot recall the nym so I'm not going to speak authoritatively. But if memory serves, someone voiced they had issues surrounding a PR and they too were banished to the cornfields by some of the same people IIRC. It sounds like the Github needs a group of impartial moderators at this point to remove the perception that opposition gets censored/treated unfairly? Some food for thought from an outside observer.

People seem to be confused about the fact that although Bitcoin Core is open source software, the bitcoin/bitcoin Github repository is a private space, not a public square. As a private space it has rules. Very few, and there's not much enforcement, but they're there. And those rules are not decided by users (in fact, ultimately Microsoft controls the domain). People are free to fork the code and create an alternative space to work on that code. There they can have whatever rules they want. You can make it completely private. The MIT license is very permissive, you don't even have to share the resulting code. You could also allow anyone to comment and sell viagra pills. Up to you! Such code forks are not ideal though. It could create confusion around where to download the "real" Bitcoin Core. Slightly different codebases make things difficult to audit. When implementations diverge too much, it will make future soft forks hard to coordinate. But if contributors to Bitcoin Core can't get any work done when doing so in public, they'll have to find another way to get work done. So as a user, you should not be happy when brigading happens on the repo. Those are precious developer days being wasted, in which actual bugs are not being fixed - or even introduced because tired developers make mistakes. Even if you disagree with a specific change, you have an interest in that being communicated in a non-disruptive manner. View quoted note →